It was used. The Soviets detonated a version of Tsar Bomba that had a yield of between 50 and 62 megatons in the Novaya Zemyla archipelago on 30 October 1961. The blast shattered windows hundreds of miles from where it was set off, and aerial photos of the place it was detonated still show a severely scorched rock surface.

This was the only purpose that bomb was good for. It was built because Khrushchev had downed too much Stoli at a UN meeting the year before, and threatened to show the United States “Kuzka’s Mother,” a Russian euphemism that basically means “We’ll show you!”

Well, Nikita had popped off and now he had to do something, so he had his nuclear scientists cobble together an enormous super-bomb and then set it off in the middle of nowhere, where it vaporized a lot of rock, broke a bunch of windows, and damn near killed the crew of the airplane that they sent to drop the thing—they got 28 miles away before it blew up, their plane lost a kilometer (0.62 miles) of altitude from the shock wave (which reached them at 71 miles), and the pilot of the plane died 15 years later at the age of 53—but hey, at least they made him a Hero of the Soviet Union!

The Soviets never built another one. Its only value or consequence was propaganda and intimidation. Well, that and the environmental damage it did to Novaya Zemlya, where the glaciers are still 65–130 times more radioactive than normal, 60 years after the bombing. Way to go, Comrade Nikita! You sure showed the polar bears!

If you want to see what ground zero of the Tsar Bomba looks like: Maps